Municipal Politics – Page 27

Casinos and the Pope’s rules.

May 20, 2013 by Peter Lowry

It is supposed to be an Italian saying about the Pope and birth control. It is that people who do not play the game should not make the rules for those who play. Having a rule such as that would also certainly save a lot of time tomorrow when Toronto City Council debates casinos. Based on everything we have heard to-date, it will just be the ignorant leading the stupid. People who have never been in a casino in their life will tell you what they believe.

Say what you want about our former provincial gambling tsar but Paul Godfrey knows casinos and likes to gamble. He used to go on weekend junkets to Las Vegas. He has proved that he gambles as a politician and as a businessman. He bought the Post newspapers when all the smart money is going to the Internet. He is gambling on his newspapers being able to transition to the Internet.

And when Paul’s entire board of Ontario Lottery and Gaming resigned in protest over his firing, it was a deliberate kick in the teeth for Premier Kathleen Wynne. In this day and age, that is a rare show of solidarity.

But what we will see tomorrow at Toronto City Council will be the furthest thing from solidarity. The only event that could get that council working together would be Mayor Rob Ford’s resignation.

The major problems for any discussion at City Council are the demands that city staff think the politicians should ask of any casino complex. The demands are unreasonable, a very bad business model and a guarantee of the failure of any negotiations. It is as though city staff planned it that way.

In a more perfect world than that on display at Toronto Council, the result tomorrow should be approval of Woodbine Entertainment getting the casino table games the organization has always wanted. That will leave Markham and maybe Mississauga free to fight it out for a full-fledged casino complex down the road. It would create an entertainment and convention centre for either municipality that would soon be the envy of their poor cousins in dreary old, bluestocking Toronto.

And as for Premier Wynne and her cabinet, they have to get some people at the helm of Ontario Lottery and Gaming who know something about the subject. There is no learning curve allowed.

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Billy Blair’s bully boys blow G20 bugles.

May 12, 2013 by Peter Lowry

There was a ceremony at Toronto Police Headquarters last Thursday. Almost three years after the despicable events of June 26 and June 27, 2010, Police Chief William Blair had some of his people recognized for their hard work after the fiasco of the G20. Nobody else wanted to recognize the police officers and others involved. Many citizens wanted the police to take responsibility for their own lack of judgement and malfeasance.

The fact that William Blair is still chief of police in Toronto proves that those really responsible for the events of the G20 have never been charged. Canadians are still waiting for a judicial inquiry into what happened. Who was responsible in Ottawa for the overwhelming use of Canadian police forces? Who was responsible at Queen’s Park for the improper and untested legislative orders? Who was responsible for the unwarranted detention of citizens without legal recourse? There are many more questions that remain unanswered because there are too many to blame.

But Blair’s Toronto Police were on the firing line and they forgot to serve and protect. The Toronto police failed in serving all Canadians. They acted in a brutal and unthinking manner. They reacted instead of following their plan. They were made to look like incompetent fools by a few anarchists. They shamed us all.

In a news release issued by the Toronto Police Service last week entitled G20 Investigative Project, it says that “On Saturday, June 26^th, peaceful protesters were joined by a large group of violent participant’s intent on causing damage to private and public property.” Along with the bad grammar, improper punctuation and archaic writing style, the release went on to say that “The City of Toronto had never seen or experienced this level of civil disorder in our history in both the level of violence and property damage.”

What is wrong with this statement is that the police had advance warning of the small group of anarchists from Montreal bent on causing trouble. They tell us that they had police officers embedded in the crowd. Do these police know nothing about mob psychology? The entire incident could have been contained and stopped and the Toronto police stood by and watched.

The investigative project team that received the award was the group who looked at many thousands of pictures after the event to identify the small group of original anarchists and about the same number of foolish people who joined in. Instead of receiving awards, heads should have rolled.

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Has the Sally Ann got it wrong?

May 9, 2013 by Peter Lowry

Having spent a lifetime working with charities, the Sally Ann has always had a soft spot with us. It comes from a tradition of those who have served in the military wanting to return the favour to the Salvation Army for what it has contributed to our military.

That did not prevent a vociferous reaction last week when coming across a full page advertisement in the Toronto Star on behalf of the Salvation Army. It was an advertisement decrying the possibility of a casino in Toronto. This was wrong in so many ways that this blog entry has been delayed for a cooling-off period.

First and foremost, whether contributed for this purpose or not, this is money that the Sally Ann will not be spending to help the indigent and those in need in our communities. The ad is unwarranted proselytizing and it is a narrow, warped and outdated view of evils that humans face. As a charitable organization, the Salvation Army has a responsibility to spend its own and its supporters’ funds only in pursuit of the objectives of the organization. That does not include broadcasting an uninformed opinion on legal activities of our society.

The full page advertisement provided no information as to the supposed evils of gambling. If the Salvation Army is seeing any serious rise in the number of problem gamblers, it has a responsibility to report it. Obviously the Sally Ann chaplains working with certain elements of our society could probably tell us even more about the evils of the illegal gambling that they find. It is demeaning and wrong for the Salvation Army to castigate legal gambling without recognizing the evils of illegal gambling.

Nobody is asking the Army to act in a hypocritical manner on this question. We would expect the Sally Ann to be thumbs down on gambling. It is a form of entertainment that is not expected to meet the church’s approval. It is also unsuitable for non adults.

But for the Salvation Army to be involved in this current fiasco in Toronto is not only a waste of money that could have been better employed, it is contributing to the ignorance of the current argument. It sheds no light. It is unappreciated interference. It is an attempt to force the question into a moral context in which it does not belong. Right or wrong, the Ontario government is in the business of gambling. It earns billions in revenue from it.

It should also be noted that the Ontario government is the province-wide purveyor of Demon Rum. It also makes billions from that trade. If you really think you can part the province from any of its evil income, you can talk to our Ontario politicians. Good luck!

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Casino debate? Don’t bet on it.

May 2, 2013 by Peter Lowry

If there is an elected city council anywhere that knows the difference between debate and posturing, it has been keeping it secret. Toronto Council will spend a day on May 21 debating whether Toronto will have a downtown casino. You know ahead of time, that it will be a day of posturing, not enlightenment.

It would save all members of council from looking colossally stupid if they just convened, voted and then spent the day helping out at their local food bank or soup kitchen. There is nothing new they can say on the subject of a casino that they have not already said ad nauseam. They have absolutely no new information. The basic problem is that they are short on facts and long on biases.

And, as is the usual custom, they have been misled by city staff. The list of demands, prepared by staff, that they are supposed to impose on a developer are a joke. No honest developer would ever agree to all those conditions. And they certainly cannot promise the city $100 million a year. A casino is a business. It has to be run as a business. If it is not run as a business, most knowledgeable gamblers would stay away from it.

It would certainly help if Toronto councillors made a field trip to Niagara Falls. This is not to gamble but to just look at three casinos. They are the new Fallsview, the old Casino Niagara and the Seneca Casino on the American side of the river. Frankly, after looking at the three casinos, you would not want Ontario Lottery and Gaming to be responsible for a tattoo parlour. What the councillors would learn is that the casino business works well when it is able to be competitive.

On May 21, Torontonians can at least expect that Woodbine Entertainment will finally get the city nod for some table games and be recognized as a full-fledged casino. A downtown casino is not as good a bet. Not to worry though, Markham Council might not act as stupid and that municipality would be a very profitable location for a casino.

With privately run, casinos at Woodbine, Orillia and Markham, healthy competition between them can be encouraged. They might not be the cash cows demanded by greedy politicians but they might just serve as legal outlets for gambling in this part of our country and serve to reduce the cash outflow to Las Vegas.

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You have gotta hand it to Rosie.

April 16, 2013 by Peter Lowry

There is a saying that the true measure of a person’s intelligence is how much they agree with you. That makes Rosie DiManno at the Toronto Star a very intelligent person. We had frankly given up any hope of any writer at the Toronto Star telling the truth about the current casino controversy in the city. Just read her page two story today (April 16, 2013). It is bang on the target!

Mind you, Rosie is a superb writer. It is obvious in everything she writes that she really enjoys writing. And not since the days of Pierre Burton and Gordon Sinclair writing columns has the Toronto Star given a writer the same freedom. Rosie writes what she sees. If anyone dares to edit her copy, it is done with care and respect.

Rosie reminds you of Pierre Burton in one way. Pierre tended to be overly fond of his own wordsmithing. He could always write a thousand words when 200 words could do the job. In the modern 140-character world of Twitter, Pierre Burton would be a dinosaur. Rosie must also be paid by the word. Her columns are typically over 1000 words. You tend to use various speed reading techniques to quickly grasp what she is going on about.

But every word of Rosie’s column today is another gem. She could get into trouble with the Star’s lawyers for referring to one petitioner before city council executive as a “whack-job.” It is unlikely there is a judge who would fine her more than a loonie for that bit of slander. On the Internet, nobody cares.

Rosie gets you laughing by telling you about the petitioner who gives the politicians the raspberry. Here you have some 200 people having their three minutes of fame, making fools of themselves in front of the executive committee. This is high humour. The more she tells you about what they said, the less you understand about the basic question.

But Rosie helps. She recognizes that somewhere in the GTA, there will be a casino. ((She might not be aware of the illegal ones that have been thriving under the radar.) Rosie figures that what the Ontario government wants, the Ontario government gets. And it wants the easy money that a casino offers the proprietors.

Rosie says that the Exhibition grounds or Woodbine would be the best location for the Toronto casino. And that was Babel-on-the-Bay’s stand when this entire dialogue started. Welcome to common sense Rosie!

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Titillating with crime, casinos and corruption

April 14, 2013 by Peter Lowry

The Toronto Star’s war on casinos has gone far beyond silly. It makes you wish you were old enough to remember if the Star fought as hard in the last century to keep the swings locked in Toronto’s parks on Sundays. It is hard to get used to the Toronto Star in such a regressive and foolish stance. Now they have the anti-casino faction evoking images of a supposedly corrupt and evil Macau to frighten Torontonians. It seems that when you have nothing else negative to say on the issue, you might as well lie.

Anti-casino Councillor Adam Vaughan has added his name to an opinion piece written by a Sandy Garossino entitled “Three of a kind: Crime, casinos and corruption. While the article seems to flirt with slander, it has editing scars that indicate some of the more scurrilous content has likely been exorcised. What is left is an ill-conceived, poorly-executed trash piece that would embarrass Toronto Sun editors.

To say that American gambling resort developers such as Las Vegas Sands Corp., MGM and Wynne are involved in money laundering in Macau is an ignorant accusation. Any supposed wrongdoing in Macau is entirely a matter between the People’s Republic of China and its citizens. Many Chinese not only like to gamble but they are also very resourceful when heavy-handed rules by a totalitarian government need to be bent a bit.

To say that The Macau model is what casino operators would recommend for Toronto is ridiculous. The truth is that Macau only brought in the Las Vegas operators in the last ten years to attract gamblers from around the world with North American opulence and games such as blackjack and craps. The timing is such that the new emerging capitalism of China is creating the players who can afford to gamble there.

The American Macau casinos are very much like the Las Vegas model. Casinos dominate the Macau Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. With at least 40 per cent of revenues in the former Portuguese Colony derived from gambling, Macau is now a substantial money maker for the People’s Republic. If they know about corruption there, Councillor Vaughan and his co-writer should advise the Chinese authorities. Some American agencies might speculate on whether rules might be overlooked but speculation is not proof.

Toronto’s Executive Council will be discussing casinos at its meeting Monday or Tuesday. That committee will then determine if they wish to refer the question to the full council next month. It would certainly be a unique experience if people would just keep their comments to facts they know about. It would keep discussion very brief.

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“I’m just a lonely boy, lonely and blue.”

April 10, 2013 by Peter Lowry

Ottawa’s Paul Anka said it best. You can understand the anguish of his famous song when you feel lonely. And, wow, can you ever feel lonely when you find you are allied with that rag-tag group of misfits on the Toronto Executive Committee. These people want a casino in Toronto for all the wrong reasons.

Toronto Council, according to most of its spokespeople, is motivated solely by greed. They want casino operators to guaranteed hosting fees of at least $100 million per year. No responsible developer can guarantee that from a casino. And woe-betide the casino operator who has to put paying his nut to the city ahead of building and maintaining a healthy base of happy customers.

This fiasco draws you to the conclusion that neither side of the casino issue knows what they are talking about. And that hardly stops them from telling you all about what they do not know.

And now we find that a staff report for city councillors recommends that they use the casino as a carrot for a developer who will include an over-sized convention complex with the casino. The report thinks that such a complex could attract some $392 million in direct spending in the city. What the report fails to tell the councillors is that a casino by itself, properly located and promoted, could keep as many as five per cent of visitors in the city for an extra day and probably generate three times as much direct spending.

The report does, grudgingly, suggest that council support the expansion of Woodbine Entertainment into a full-fledged casino operation. This should have happened years ago and it draws on an entirely different market than a downtown or Scarborough location would serve.

People in Toronto should remember that theirs is the fourth largest English speaking metropolitan area in North America and it attracts over 20 million visitors a year. Nobody cares if you like to gamble or not. Some people do. If we are going to continue to attract visitors to our city, we need to offer a wide range of attractions, activities, sports, theatre, dining, etc. Casinos are just part of the excitement and fun of a great city experience.

Casinos are not a cash cow for lazy city councillors who are bereft of good ideas as to how they can fund the infrastructure and services that make a great city work.

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Bringing you the ultimate casino debate.

April 1, 2013 by Peter Lowry

Would someone please tell Toronto City Council to get on with it! The Toronto Star ran what must be story number 50 in the anti-casino debate last week. The embarrassment was that it was written by David Olive, one of the Star’s better writers. It just goes to prove that people will most often write what they are told to write to keep their job.

David Olive’s story was headlined Time to walk away from the casino debate. We only wish the Star would. This story was about the “astonishing” report released March 12 by the Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI) at the University of Toronto. (Why it took almost three weeks for the Toronto Star to discover this “astonishing” report was not explained.) In his typical colourful language, David tells us that the MPI report “knocks the stuffing out of the casino advocates’ bloated claims…”

The MPI report and David Olive and the Toronto Star seem to see the possibility of a casino in Toronto as being a “blizzard of numbers—all of them meaningless—and conveyed in a remarkably skewed and misleading manner.” And that certainly seems to be the Toronto Star’s style.

It is David Olive’s premise in the story that there is a limit to how much money the gambling industry can drain from bettors. He thinks we have reached it.

We all need to be reminded that it is not Ontario Lottery and Gaming that is promoting all the smoke and mirrors of large scale resort gambling complexes in Toronto. OLG has finally realized that it is not the organization to be running gaming in Ontario. It wants to turn the business end of things over to the private sector. If those private sector advocates want to make asses of themselves with stupid projections, that is their game. OLG is just being honest and open and offering an opportunity to the Greater Toronto Area.

It might have been fine to have casinos in the major border cities and up in Orillia at the beginning but the price of gas is hurting the casino business in Ontario. People in Toronto should not need to pay bus companies or gasoline retailers to have fun at a casino.

And the MPI people are probably right that Toronto hardly needs a casino to continue to grow, expand and be an economic success. If anything, a casino can be equated to Gay Pride Week, Caribana (or whatever we call it now) and closing down Yonge Street for a street party. These events and a casino are just part of the fabulous mix that says Toronto is a great city. It is saying “We are big kids now and we can play at adult games.”

And Toronto Star editors can stick their anti-casino bias in their ears!

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Chief Blair opposes arrogance and entitlement?

March 28, 2013 by Peter Lowry

It seems that Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair wants his police officers to work to a higher standard. We hear he has made a video for his officers to complain about their culture of arrogance and entitlement. He is reported to have said in the video that “you don’t get to be an idiot in our uniform. You don’t get to be an idiot diminishing our organization…”

But what Blair seems to have failed to do was identify the chief idiot.

Who can forget the events of the summer of 2010? If there had been a proper judicial enquiry into the actions of police during the G20, Chief Bill Blair would have been fired. His police can hide their name tags, they can brutalize citizens, they can run rampant but there is a point when you find the person in charge and hold that person responsible. And that person is the Toronto Chief of Police.

He started by doing the right thing. He asked. He asked the Ontario government what law allowed him to keep citizens away from the zone being created—and fenced off—around the G20 meeting area. He was hardly given some secret law. He was given a hastily drafted regulation related to the Public Works Protection Act. All it offered was a description of the area being reserved for the G20 Summit. It allowed his police to restrict entry to the area.

The rest was pretence and sham. Bill Blair lied about his police authority that weekend. He had not been told to keep citizens away from the G20 area—only to keep them out. He had no special authority to chase peaceful crowds meeting in the area around Queen’s Park. He had no right at all to kettle peaceful citizens many city blocks away from the G20 meeting. He had no right to imprison anyone without charges.

And where he was irresponsibly derelict was in standing back and allowing a group of anarchists to create mayhem on normally peaceful streets in Toronto. He deliberately used the actions of a few to oppress the majority of citizens. It is a tactic of despots from the beginning of time.

Mr. Blair is probably very proud of himself for how he handled the G20 event in Toronto. His actions were not those of someone with the moral backbone to lecture others on their responsibilities to the citizens of Toronto. He owes Torontonians and Canadians his deepest apologies and his resignation as chief of police.

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Working for the next Toronto mayor.

March 23, 2013 by Peter Lowry

Political apparatchik John Laschinger must be looking for business. It is never too early to line up possible contenders for the next mayoralty race in Toronto. It is the best political gig of all. You can get paid for up to nine months of work. John’s only problem though is that he needs to find a better candidate than MP Olivia Chow. John needs to make a comeback after his dismal showing in Toronto’s last municipal election with former Deputy Mayor Joe Pantalone.

And it hardly matters that Olivia Chow gets higher recognition than Rob Ford in theoretical polling for mayoralty candidates. While the left wing of council would rally around her as a candidate, the right wing would zero in on her weaknesses in very short order. Her first short coming for the job is her lack of any leadership ability.

But Laschinger should be familiar with that weakness from his experience campaigning with Joe Pantalone. He might have also seen that shallow CBC-TV bio-pic “Jack.” While we all realize how the Harper government has strangled CBC funding, you would think the corporation still had some writing standards. And please do not say there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Maybe John’s problem is that he is just not cut out for left-wing campaigns. He is just too right-wing to understand the needs of such a campaign. It is the same as those of us who have always worked the centre-left. We would have a hard time running a campaign for someone like Rob Ford.

Mind you, as things stand, Rob Ford has an easy ride into the mayor’s chair in October, 2014. There is just no candidate ready in the wings who can take him out. There is no other candidate with the easy access to the news media. There is no city councillor ready to challenge him. There is nobody eager to trade the drive to Queen’s Park for the prime parking spot under Toronto City Hall. And only a very foolish Member of Parliament would resign a federal seat early to take a run at Ford.

And it is important to remember that leadership is not just popularity numbers. A potential mayor of Toronto has to do more than clearly demonstrate leadership. You also have to know where the voters of Toronto want to go. Then you have to take them by the hand and lead them there.

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